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Following a
trend in many Southern states to take down the Confederate battle flag, the
City Council of New Orleans voted on 17 December 2015 to remove four monuments
to the Confederacy from the city’s landscape. Three of those statues honour
General
Robert E. Lee, General Beauregard and Jefferson Davis, President of the
Confederacy. The fourth monument is an obelisk celebrating the Battle of
Liberty Place, when members of the Crescent City White League attacked the New Orleans Metropolitan Police in their effort to overthrow a
biracial Republican government and a black-dominated legislature. The
proposal was introduced by a majority of City Council members. But opponents to
took it to the Federal Appeals Court, while white supremacists started
threatening those sponsoring the proposal and the contractor hired for the job.

The issue of slavery still plagues the lives of the inhabitants of New Orleans.

This case is a
perfect illustration of how the issue of slavery still plagues the lives of the
inhabitants of New Orleans. As things stand, controversial monuments imposed by
white supremacists dominate public space. With the noticeable exception of the
statue of Louis Armstrong, the black population (more than 60% of the city) is excluded
from memorialisation in public space – New Orleans is still awaiting its first
markers related to slavery.

In
sharp contrast to New Orleans, a museum exclusively dedicated to the memorialisation
of slavery was recently open to the public on the Whitney Plantation. This
historic site is located on the west bank of the Mississippi river, on the
historic River Road in St. John the Baptist Parish, less than an hour west of
New Orleans. As a site of memory, with the focus on the lives of the slaves and
their legacies, visitors can experience the world of an 18th and 19th
century indigo or sugar plantation through the eyes of the enslaved people who
lived and worked there.

The
ninety minute tour of the plantation is mostly devoted to the memorials built
on the site. The Wall of Honour is dedicated to all the
people who were enslaved on the plantation. Their names and basic information relating
to them were retrieved from original archives and engraved on granite slabs. Similarly,
the Allées Gwendolyn Midlo Hall is
dedicated to all the people who were enslaved in Louisiana. Named after
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, author of Africans in Colonial Louisiana (1992) and
Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas (2005), it recognises this
scholar’s contribution to the history of slavery in the Americas. All the 107,000
names recorded in her Louisiana Slave Database are engraved on 216 granite
slabs mounted on 18 walls.

Yet the
most striking memorial at the Whitney Museum is still in the making and is
dedicated to the 1811 slave uprising on the German coast of Louisiana. In
January 1811, an uprising erupted involving an estimated number of 500 enslaved
people in the lower Mississippi parishes of St. Charles, St. John, and St.
James. It was the largest slave revolt in the U.S South, beginning on 8 January
on the plantation of Colonel Manuel Andry, commander
of the local militia. On their march towards New Orleans, the insurgents
burned several plantations and added more recruits, including maroons who had
been living in the woods. Many planters fled to the city with their families.

The uprising had several
leaders – five of them born in Africa. It was apparently well planned and sought to
capture New Orleans, free all the people enslaved there, and either lay the
foundations for a black ‘nation’ or lead the people to a free country like
Haiti or Mexico. The plotters knew that if they lost only death would await.

Unfortunately, they werehindered by weak
firepower. On 10 January 1811, several detachments of militiamen
attacked the rebels and by January 11the insurrection was broken when the regular
troops of General Hampton joined Major Milton’s Dragoons at Destréhan plantation.
Many insurgents were killed and others fled into the swamps.

The freedom fighters knew that if they lost only death would await

On the evening of 12 January
1811, Charles Deslondes – the main leader of the insurrection – and several
others were executed in the quarters of Colonel Andry after an expeditious
trial. For the next two days, another trial took place with a court composed of
Judge Pierre Bauchet St. Martin and a jury of five slave-owners. The insurgents
were called ‘brigands’, like rebels throughout
history, and judgments rendered without appeal. Convicted, the insurgents were
shot in front of the plantations to which they ‘belonged’, before being beheaded
and having their heads posted on poles as a warning to other enslaved men,
women and children.

To commemorate
this, the Whitney Museum has commissioned 63 ceramic heads from African-American
artist Woodrow Nash. Those depicting the martyred rebels will be mounted on
steel rods and displayed in a secluded area. The graphic memorial will be
accessible only to adults. The place is designed to be like a shrine where
people can perform prayers and libations. But more needs to be done to honour
these freedom fighters, especially in New Orleans, where a monument should be
erected. Mayor Mitch Landrieu described the decision to remove the
Confederate monuments as a courageous decision, turning a page on a divisive
past. Now New Orleans must go further. It should focus on celebrating its
unique Afro-Creole culture, and its public space should be open to the
memorialisation of the evils of slavery, as the evils of the Shoah are remembered
elsewhere. The more the city does this, the more it will generate emotion and consciousness,
both of which are necessary as we walk the path towards real reparations.

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